One Rule | The Devil's Minion

An hour past, Daniel had flung a fistful of hundreds in his face for offering a year's wages to stay in the house, and the bills still lay where they'd fallen, across the terrace tiles and the cushions of the wicker couch, one of them glued to the toe of Armand's boot by a smear of spilled brandy. The sum had been generous. Armand had named it with some pride, in the warm dark, with the sea sighing against the rocks below the villa and the night air heavy with salt and jasmine. Daniel had stared at him with his mouth working and reached for the brandy first and the money after. Now he lay sprawled on the couch with his mouth open and one shoe off, snoring loudly with a wet catch at the top of every breath, and the other shoe lay on its side beneath him.

Armand sat on the floor beside him and peeled the bill from his boot. It came away tacky between his fingers and carried the smell of alcohol and tobacco, and of the sweat of a man who hadn't slept properly in a month, and beneath all of it ran a faint sweetish sourness that no bottle accounted for, the smell a body gives off when it has begun its departure, as familiar to him as rain coming in off the Adriatic. He gathered the other bills from the tiles one by one and squared each against the last until the edges met, for his hands had needed an occupation in every century when the rest of him was elsewhere.

He could hear the heart from where he sat, that fast thin hammering, and every ninth or tenth beat it faltered and missed, like a stone step that wasn't there in the dark. Heat came off Daniel in a steady living wave that Armand felt on his face and his hands.

The vow was brief enough to say in one breath: he would never make another of his kind. He had explained it to Daniel in the first month, in the plainest words he owned, and Daniel had nodded as he nodded at all explanations, without a syllable of it reaching him. Marius had taken Armand dying, fevered with the sweating sickness after the Englishman's poison, and for five hundred years Armand had asked himself whether he'd have been taken at all had he stood well and strong in that palazzo. He had despised Marius for the making, and worse for the years of silence after the fire in Rome, and he had loved him through all of it, which he held against him most. Daniel would be the same; Daniel would be worse. Anyone made at a deathbed would count his eternity from the deathbed and find Armand's hand at the start of every night of it, and who could blame him? Daniel hated him plenty already. Tonight he had shown that his aim was good.

And in the ground Daniel would drift. Armand had told him so on a street in Rome after dragging him out of a theater, that death might be chaos, a dream with no waking, and Daniel had gone white under the lamps. Armand had called it philosophy. He couldn't hold the picture of Daniel in that fathomless dark for the length of a breath without looking away, at the sea, at the money. A dead man could hate no one. Armand arrived at that thought every night and every night walked around it, because he didn't care for the place it led.

"Quit it."

Daniel hadn't opened his eyes. "You're doing the thing where you don't fucking blink," he said into the cushion. "I can feel it from here. It's creepy."

"I blinked."

"When?"

"Just now. You missed it."

"Liar." One eye opened, bloodshot, the violet gone muddy, and landed on the bills. "Oh, hell. I did that."

"It was an exceptionally fine throw," Armand said.

"You think I threw it 'cause it wasn't enough."

"Wasn't it?"

"Fuck you, Armand." The eye closed again. "And quit tapping them. I can hear you squaring them up."

"They were in my way."

"They were in your way." Daniel breathed for a while. "How long've I got? I asked in Rome and you went off about chaos."

The number was already in Armand's mouth; he'd kept it ready for three weeks, smooth as a coin worn thin by handling. The true one was five years, perhaps fewer, and the missed beat had come sooner each week since spring. "Forty," he said.

"Forty." Daniel did the sum with his lips. "So I'd be, what. Seventy-eight."

"Seventy-two."

"That's what I said." He dragged his hand up to scratch his jaw, and it shook, and he tucked it under his ribs without a word. "It's the booze."

"Naturally," Armand said.

Daniel's breathing slowed and deepened, and the sea kept whispering prayers and accusations below the terrace. "Stay" he said into the cushion. It meant nothing. He said it to bartenders and cab drivers and hotel clerks who hadn't asked him anything. The stack in his hands went crooked.

Tomorrow at dusk, with Daniel sober, he would say five. He would say it to his face. Daniel would ask for the other thing the way he asked for everything: loudly and with insults, and Armand would say no because that was one rule he just couldn't break.